Mobile Payments: The Future Is Here

Starting this 2015, all the conveniences of life will get assimilated into one amazing device; your mobile phone. Not only can you communicate with others and entertain yourself via your phone, you can now treat it like a payment option to pay on the go; everything with just your beloved phone.

Gone are the days when a bag of wheat could be bartered for livestock – today’s payments are much lighter, at least in terms of the literal bulk. When you choose to pay by mobile, you actively remove the need to carry cash or cards ever again.

Paying by mobile phone has been made possible thanks to NFC technology – this Near Field Technology is an updated version of the radio frequency identification – RFID, but considered much safer. RFID is the technology that helps you scan into your office, very handy, but not as secure as NFC. When you pay with your NFC-enabled phone, the NFC POS must be at least four inches away from each other for the transaction to take place.

An NFC-enabled mobile helps you make payments with your phone that uses a secure technology to connect to the customer’s bank and the payee’s system. It’s that simple – a tap, and sometimes not even that; a simple proximity can enable you to pay by your phone.

Currently, most smart phones including Apple, Android and Windows phones are NFC-enabled and hence are ready to pay-by-mobile. With the advent of features like Apple Pay and Google Wallet, paying by mobile is coming to the forefront – it is entirely possible to pay with your mobile phone that is just equipped with a SIM! The SIM acts as an identification tool with the network and therefore enables you to pay by phone.

Why should you get into this pay-by-phone system? Cash and cards seem to work just fine, right? Give this a though; you are already conducting cashless transactions when you pay by card, but those transactions are not entirely safe and require you to share your confidential information.

Firstly, not everyone has access to credit or debit cards, or sometimes not even a bank. Imagine being able to make fast and convenient purchases with a simple tap of your phone or a quick click on the internet, even without a credit card or a bank account.

Secondly, there is always the threat of theft with cash and the threat of both theft and fraud with credit and debit cards. When you pay by phone, the transaction does not require you to enter anything except your PIN or password or other forms of individual IDs – everything right on your own phone. You also need not share confidential details with the merchant when you pay by mobile.

At the moment, you can pay by phone for goods and services online, in-store, and even for small services that would normally require the hassle of carrying and counting exact change; for parking, tolls and bus fares.

Due to the push for pay-by-phone within the mobile industry, customers are becoming more acquainted with the benefits of paying by mobile and are requesting additional features such as incorporation of loyalty cards and discount vouchers into mobile phones as well.

This brings us to the future and your obvious role in the expansion of mobile payments. When everyone has the option to pay by phone, the untapped consumer demographics such as those without access to financial instruments will become tap-able. The convenience of paying by mobile will entice more consumers to adapt to this mode of payment and this will lead consumers to turn towards mobile network operators to exploit this unique service. Merchants offering mobile payment options will benefit by attracting all the customers who are in pursuit of convenience; resulting in higher sales volume and increased loyalty.

Mobile payment not only promotes a cashless society, but it also enables contact-less transactions. The security and convenience of paying through a phone is sure to attract many consumers and the domino effect it will have on the economy at large is nothing short of becoming phenomenal! Just by choosing to pay by phone, you, as an individual are choosing to become a part of a huge economic wave that will carry us right into the future that is promising and exciting indeed.

Author Bio: This article was written by Soofia. She is a technology geek and she loves to learn everything about mobile technology. She currently works at Boloro which is a mobile payment network.